Multisensory Interactions in Virtual Reality: Optic flow reduces vestibular sensitivity, but only for congruent planes of motion

During exposure to
Virtual Reality (VR) a sensory conflict may be present, whereby the visual
system signals that the user is moving in a certain direction with a certain
acceleration, while the vestibular system signals that the user is stationary.
In order to reduce this conflict, the brain may down-weight vestibular signals,
which may in turn affect vestibular contributions to self-motion perception.
Here we investigated whether vestibular perceptual sensitivity is affected by
VR exposure. Participants’ ability to detect artificial vestibular inputs was
measured during optic flow or random motion stimuli on a VR head-mounted
display. Sensitivity to vestibular signals was significantly reduced when optic
flow stimuli were presented, but importantly this was only the case when both
visual and vestibular cues conveyed information on the same plane of
self-motion. Our results suggest that the brain dynamically adjusts the weight
given to incoming sensory cues for self-motion in VR; however this is dependent on the
congruency of visual and vestibular cues.

在虚拟现实（VR）的体验过程中，可能会出现一种感官冲突现象，即视觉系统指示用户以特定加速度朝某一方向移动，而前庭系统则表明用户处于静止状态。为了缓解这种冲突，大脑可能会降低前庭信号的权重，进而可能影响前庭对自身运动感知的贡献。本研究旨在探讨VR暴露是否会影响前庭感知的敏感性。在VR头戴显示器上，对参与者在视流或随机运动刺激下的人工前庭输入的检测能力进行了测量。当呈现视流刺激时，对前庭信号的敏感性显著降低，但重要的是，这种情况仅在视觉和前庭线索在相同运动平面上传递信息时才会发生。我们的研究结果表明，大脑会动态调整对VR中自身运动感知的输入信号的权重；然而，这种调整依赖于视觉和前庭线索的一致性。